Mind Mapping for Clearer Thinking & Planning

I have been able to witness my fifth grader grow so much as a writer in the year and half that we have been homeschooling. He has a lot of strengths in writing, including stamina, a great vocabulary, and a tendency to try to emulate specific techniques of writers he loves. His writing has become vastly more coherent than it used to be, now with (mostly) correct punctuation and few run-on sentences. 

That said, left on his own he tends to dive into a piece of writing, then as he works on it, digress into long sections on whatever details fascinate or amuse him most. While I'm certainly impressed that he can write at length and stay happily engaged on one piece for days and days, I know the area in which he needs to improve is overall, big-picture organization. This year I wanted to help him learn to make a good workable plan before he starts a piece of writing, something that would keep him on track while he wrote, reminding him of what really belongs and what doesn't, what he's already written and what he still needs to cover.  

This fall one day, I quickly showed W how to make an outline, using Roman numerals to list the sections he wanted to write, and letters for the important points within those sections. He tried to make an outline for an informational piece he was to write. It got pretty messy, with no white space, lots of words and details crammed in and curling all over the page, and the order in which he thought of things and wrote them in the outline not matching the order in which he would eventually want to write about these things. He hadn't yet learned how to choose just the important key words to jot for this planning stage, so that was part of the trouble. He also didn't like having to make this outline, recognized that it was a bit of a mess when finished, and didn't refer to it much while writing his piece, but instead ignored it and did most of his thinking and planning as he went, as usual. 

One of W's outlines, that wasn't very user-friendly, before learning about mind maps

That particular writing piece came out alright in the end. But the extent to which the written outline format wasn't a guiding, useful tool to him made me look to alternatives that might better help him organize and plan. That's when we started to learn about mind maps.

Mind maps have helped a lot! Mind maps are another way to plan a piece of writing, or to organize thinking on a topic. A mind map is a graphic organizer. It's a refined version of a simple brainstorming web. A mind map uses unlined paper. The main topic is in the center, possibly with a little symbolic drawing to accompany it. Shooting out from the main topic are branches for each of your main subtopics. Each branch is in a different color and could also have an image accompanying it. From the end of each of the subtopic branches, you might have one or two or more small lines branching out to show details about that subtopic. There are some good explanations and samples of mind maps at several different web sites:

• https://www.mindmapping.com/mind-map
• https://www.tonybuzan.edu.sg/about/mind-maps/
• Also, a Google images search for "mind map structure" shows a lot of examples 

A practice mind map exercise: mapping things he likes

A traditional outline is linear, list-like, reads from top to bottom on lined paper-- and works well for many of us. Mind maps on not linear. By using color, images, and words, and using space creatively on a blank sheet of paper, mind mapping uses right-brained skills as well as left. Perhaps smart people who struggle with organization like my son, or anyone when working with a topic that feels particularly confusing or nebulous, would find mind maps helpful. For those who write as they plan or for whom ideas come in random order, a mind map can be a way to create order out of chaos. It's easy to add another branch, or another detail to a mind map in progress. It is also easy to see and work with the whole that a mind map presents. The end result sticks more because it's visual.  

W and I have been reading Mind Maps for Kids by Tony Buzan a few pages a day. The book is filled with examples of how to use mind maps, juxtaposed with more traditional ways to do the same tasks. It is interspersed with little exercises to stop and practice the skill, so it's a quick and active read. (It also has some little jokes and brainteasers sprinkled throughout to give brains a break from the mapping work every now and then.) It is published in Britain, so there is some vocabulary we've gotten to discuss as we go, like revising=studying, and maths=math. 

Mind map about a story about a vacation

The thing about using mind maps, or any type of outlining, to plan writing is that one needs to stop and think before diving in. Which are my main points and how many of them are there? How can I summarize each one with a key word or two? What is the supporting information I want to be sure to include for each section? 

These days, W thinks through some of these questions, then puts pen to paper to make a mind map. Then, his ideas are visually organized and color-coded before he types his first sentences on the computer (which is how he drafts these days). He still decides as he goes which branches of the mind map he'll write about in which order, but it's all laid out there for him, easy to navigate, so he can stay more grounded and on track. For a fantasy story he's been working on, he made a general plot arc before he began and also two small mind maps: one for the main character, with various facts and traits about him on the branches, and one for the setting. He keeps his notebook open to these mind maps as he writes and I can see the places where the details from them get woven into his stories. I'm looking forward to seeing how he categorizes his information for an upcoming piece he'll write about the Battle of Gettysburg. Each time he makes a mind map, he gets a little better at the process-- a little more organized, a little more succinct, a little clearer for him (and me) to pick up and understand. 

Fantasy story setting and character planning

Fantasy brainstorming

Mind maps are not only for use in planning a piece of writing. Mind maps are useful for kids in planning other things as well, and for thinking and studying such as: 

• Mind map to show/see the main points of a history article/topic 
• Mind map to sort out different quadrilaterals and their attributes. (W and I each tried this, based on an exercise in the book, and it was a great example of how a mind map on the same topic by two different people will come out differently! It all depends on how you think about and organize the topic in your own mind.) 
• Mind map to organize learning of new vocabulary (in English or a foreign language) 
• Mind map to organize spelling words-- by spelling pattern, or root word...
• Map out a novel they are reading and its themes (each theme as one of the main branches, and the smaller branches at the end being examples of how the theme shows up in the book)
• Mind map to plan gift giving to different recipients
• Mind map to plan the components of a birthday party

All of these are ways that mind mapping can make showing ideas, thinking, or studying more fun. 

Civil War causes and consequences map

I was even inspired to try mind maps for myself. I've tried using a mind map to plan out a couple of pieces of writing recently. Even though my thinking wasn't organized beforehand, or sequential, it was easy to create a mind map as I thought through a topic. It evolved organically. Since I didn't begin to write till I had the whole idea mapped out (a step I don't always do), the writing came together a lot easier than some other times. If I had known about mind mapping, the process might have helped me sort out confusing concepts in science class, and it would also have been a great study tool. Rather than making stacks of flashcards or reading through notes until I fell asleep, I might have sat down to a college exam and had a map in my head of the important topics and the connections between them. 

My kindergartner is becoming quite a writer for her age, but I haven't been using mind maps with her. It's certainly important to find ways to help young kids plan before they write. (Young kids tell wonderful, animated stories, but it takes so much effort to write them down, that their written version of the story is often far less detailed/interesting than what they can tell aloud.) But I don't think mind maps are the way to go for this purpose. At least through kindergarten and first grade, the idea of key words as notes (in any format) is too abstract for most 5-, 6-, 7-year-olds. In my experience if they make notes, the notes become their writing, copied word for word, less enthusiastically the second time. I think it's better for young kids to orally plan a story, or get ready to write by drawing the pictures first. More about that another time. 

The biggest selling point for W about mind maps is that they are fun. He says he really likes them because they are fun to make, easy to read, and much more helpful for him than other notes or outlines he has done before. I can imagine being a school teacher of older students and getting tense about kids spending time dawdling about their favorite shades of glitter pens and which pictures to draw before getting down to the business of writing the essay or story at hand. But, we have that time in homeschool. It saves time in the long run because it's a form of planning that W actually likes doing and will do. We are always telling W things like, "measure twice, cut once." There's nothing magical about the specific format of a mind map. It is just one promising way we've found to help get in the habit of slowing down and thinking and planning first before jumping into a project.  

The other day W was sending an email and he mentioned to me the mind map he was imagining in his head about the things he wanted to include in his note. I guess that's the goal of any graphic organizer or framework: to internalize it such that it doesn't need to be written out on paper, but it begins to shape the way we think and approach things. 

I've been imagining other uses for mind maps that might be fun to try out myself-- mind mapping vacation ideas, aspects of important decisions, new organization systems, holiday menus, or other events. Basically, any time I make lists, which might not always be the best way to see things clearly. The possibilities are endless.